G. K. Chesterton Quotes from "The Man Who Was Thursday"

Quotes from "The Man Who Was Thursday" by, G. K. Chesterton

"We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness."

 “I am not happy," said the Professor with his head in his hands, "because I do not understand. You let me stray a little too near to hell."

“If you were the man in the dark room, why were you also Sunday, an offense to the sunlight? If you were from the first our father and our friend, why were you also our greatest enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the iron entered into our souls—and you are the peace of God!  Oh, I can forgive God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot forgive Him His peace."

“They could not even feebly imagine what the carriages were; it was enough for them to know that they were carriages, and carriages with cushions.  They could not conceive who the old man was who had led them; but it was quite enough that he had certainly led them to the carriages.”

"I heard what you said," said the Professor, with his back turned. "I also am holding hard on to the thing I never saw."

"Well," said the cigarette smoker slowly, "what do you think now?"   "I think," said Dr. Bull with precision, "that I am lying in bed at No. 217 Peabody Buildings, and that I shall soon wake up with a jump; or, if that's not it, I think that I am sitting in a small cushioned cell in Hanwell, and that the doctor can't make much of my case.

“I can only wallow in the exquisite comfort of my own exactitude."

"Four out of the five rich men in this town, he said, are common swindlers. I suppose the proportion is pretty equal all over the world."

"Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy."

"The work of the philosophical policeman," replied the man in blue, "is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime."

"It is new to me for a nightmare to lead to a lobster. It is commonly the other way." 

"Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad, but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition."

  

"Suffice it to say that you were an inexpressibly irritating fellow, and, to do you justice, you are still. I would break twenty oaths of secrecy for the pleasure of taking you down a peg."

"When on my first appearing in episcopal gaiters in a drawing-room I cried out in a voice of thunder, 'Down! down! presumptuous human reason!' they found out in some way that I was not a bishop at all. "